Untitled (Man in Overcoat with Suitcase), c.1905-1906

Born in Brooklyn but raised in a Creole household, Pène du Bois began his artistic career at the age of fifteen. Enrolled in classes at the New York School of Art, he studied under three of America’s leading painters: William Merritt Chase, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Robert Henri. The latter’s realist philosophy was perhaps the greatest influence on the young artist and formed the basis of his aesthetic language. The fashionable street life and stage performances of Paris, where he visited on an extended trip with his father in 1905, provided further inspiration. Returning to New York the following year, Pène du Bois found work at the New York American, serving as a crime reporter by day and an opera critic by night. This window into high and low society provided him with contemporaneous material on which to base his paintings and drawings.

Untitled (Man in Overcoat with Suitcase) dates from this period of time. Dressed in a heavy overcoat, dark suit and floppy hat, the young man in the drawing hastily exits a partially sketched door but is delayed by his coat, which has become caught. Rendered in ink and pencil, the work’s illustrative quality has much in common with the Ashcan style. The work is composed of quick, intuitive strokes that match in mood the hurriedness of the subject. Using linear hatching and crosshatching techniques, the artist endows the image with depth and tonal variety. Rare in the artist’s oeuvre in that the scene is probably not based on real-life observation, this drawing nevertheless encapsulates Pène du Bois’ interest in capturing the moments of emotional conflict or tension that make up people’s lives.